What's so special about Git? Is it the right source control system for you? Find out what all the excitement's about in this Jump Start course, the second in our "ALM Wednesdays" series. Git has become wildly popular as a version control system in the development community. Companies large and small, individuals, the open source community, and others swear by Git. Join the experts Steven Borg and James Tupper as they walk you through why it's so well liked and how it's radically different from other source control systems.

In this demo-focused session, you get a fundamental understanding of Git—from a high level down to its implementation. In addition, learn how to use Git within the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and see the benefits of using Git with Visual Studio Online and Windows Azure.

Steven Borg has 20 years of experience in the software development space and has been a Microsoft ALM MVP since product inception in 2005. Steven is the Co-Founder of Northwest Cadence, a company specializing in software development processes that provides training and consulting services to companies worldwide. He speaks regularly at software development and Visual Studio conferences and has authored courseware and white papers on Team Foundation Server, regulatory compliance in software development, Scrum, and Lean. Steven has helped hundreds of organizations, both large and small, improve their software development process, reduce costs, increase quality, and speed delivery. His expertise lies in bringing successful lean and agile adoption to companies currently using traditional project management techniques to manage software development projects.

Steve is a dynamic and professional presenter and has delivered multiple sessions at Microsoft TechEd, the ALM Summit, Mitchell International DevCon, TechFuse, VSLive, and many more. He was awarded speaking slots at the 2013 TechEd N America and Europe Pre-Conference Days on Enterprise Agility and was one of the top-ranked presenters.

James Tupper is an ALM Consultant at Northwest Cadence. He is experienced with both software and hardware development, extending Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) using its APIs, and customizing TFS in unconventional ways. James has also developed solutions using the TFS work item tracking for complex scenarios that are not centered on software development.

James spends most of his time working with a multitude of customers, big and small, solving problems centered around people, process, and tools to help better their software development processes.